Tina Shull and Michael Ewers on how climate change inequity impacts Charlotte residents
Tina Shull, associate professor and director of Public History, and Michael Ewers, assistant professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Geographical Sciences, were interviewed by The Charlotte Post for ‘Charlotte forecast: Climate change inequity hits harder.’
Shull and Ewers are project directors of Climate Inequality CLT, a public history and community mapping project which explores the past, present, and future of environmental justice in Charlotte through the correlation between climate change, geography, and racism.
“I started collaborating with Michael and other professors, and we learned that our teachers and students are often very directly affected by not just climate change but environmental racism and histories of environmental justice,” said Shull. “Many of them are African American, long-term residents in Charlotte or newly arriving immigrants from all over the world that had stories about climate change impacting them.”
There is significant evidence of the disproportionate impact on vulnerable communities, like in Charlotte’s crescent of low-income and disproportionately Black neighborhoods, which have higher exposure to hazards such as pollution and extreme heat.
“I think the biggest surprise overall, or maybe it’s not a surprise, are all of the patterns that we have on our website,” said Ewers. “We have several different indicators – health, environment, industrial things – they all map onto the existing crescent and wedge formation. Why wouldn’t it be more spread out? It really maps onto the same industrial pollution, proximity to highways. It really maps on to the exact same patterns.”